“You ever been inside a hurricane?” the old woman was saying. “Right in the eyewall when the wind’s whipping so wild nothing can stand it and everything breaks? Even your own skin lifts up off your body and tries to flap away.”

She did that thing then with her arms, shaking them and making all the loose skin flatten and pull from the bone like she did every time she felt a big storm coming. It used to scare Gale, thinking of her grandma pressed taut against her own skeleton, all that extra skin snapping in the air. But that was when she was little and didn’t know much. At sixteen now she knew a lot. She knew about the Hurricane Haulers.

*     *     *
“Hey, tell me more about the Hurricane Haulers,” Gale whispered over the breakfast plates. “Mr. Innis told us—”

“I’ll tell you about the Hurricane Haulers.” Gale’s mother slapped a plate of protein strips on the table between them. “It was absolute hell. Waking up at all hours, no permanent address, living in a beat-up van with no climate control, no bathroom, no place to even cook a goddamn meal because of all the radar crap we carried. And for what? So your grandma could spend ten years locked up while me and your uncle bounced around in foster care? Uh uh. We are not gonna go through this again. There was nothing, and I mean nothing, exciting, or glamorous, or even good about being a Hurricane Hauler. The government is right. We got no business messing around with energy capture. That’s what all the big companies like EcoTech are for.”

But Gale knew different. She’d seen her grandma fiddling with some wires up on the roof when they first moved into their cottage, and afterward every time the wind blew over thirty their energy bill went down. She bet her mom knew too, but EcoTech charged so much for energy they wouldn’t have been able to keep the cottage if they paid full price. Almost everyone in town had to steal a little energy to get by. Most people had contraband solar panels, snuck out of the EcoTech factory in hundreds of pieces and reconstructed in basements or garages at night. They tucked them under false roof shingles or eaves when the inspector drones flew by. The trick was not to steal too much and raise suspicion. That’s where her science teacher Mr. Innis went wrong, and now he was doing twenty-five to life down in Clearwater and Gale had to deal with the lady from Integrative Art until they found a qualified replacement.

“It’s gonna be a real big one,” her grandma said as soon as her mom’s back was turned. “Maybe the biggest one yet. Can you feel it?”

Gale always could. It started as a twinge picking her spine and then it built and built. But what good could it do her anyway? It’s not like she could go out in a storm and find the eyewall. This wasn’t her grandma’s time. Now as soon as the hurricane sirens started everybody was required to quarantine inside and every building stayed underground until the hurricane watch lifted. If you were outside the safety drones found you and escorted you to the nearest building before it sank. Companies like EcoTech who’d already paid for the rights to a storm’s energy couldn’t take the chance even one rogue energy capturer might mess up their profits. She’d never even seen a hurricane, just felt all that power and chaos roil through her as she sat at home or in school as the day continued on, subterranean but undisturbed. She wanted to know what her grandma knew, wanted to scream into the wind as her skin tried to tear from her bones. It was a gnawing want, a destiny thwarted. She would have been a great Hurricane Hauler. Maybe the best.

Her grandma watched her, dried lips cocked to a smile and rheumy eyes gleaming. Yeah, Gale could feel it. Already it was an earthquake in her gut.

*     *     *
Her Mom got talky again on the way to school. School was never canceled due to weather like back in the day. Nobody even did weather reports anymore. That was considered stealing the energy industry’s intellectual property rights and got you the death sentence. But on a day like this any idiot could see something was coming the way the sky sat steely and stumped over the seawall, so low it seemed trying to press through Gale’s passenger side window as her mom’s jalopy coughed down the street.

“I really hope you’re listening Gale,” her mom said. “Your grandma is…how do I say this nicely?” She tapped the self-driving consul with the first fingers of both hands arrhythmically. “Okay. Look. She’s crazy. Absolutely flipping insane. That’s how she got out, you know? Otherwise she’d still be down in Clearwater with that science teacher of yours. Declared criminally insane by the courts and after some time in a prison hospital, and some treatments, she got to get out. Hey! It’s not funny. I’m serious, Gale. Your grandma’s a nut. And not only that, she’s selfish, and greedy, and a total borderline, narcissistic sociopath. I should know. She raised me. So do me, and yourself, a big favor and drop this whole Hurricane Hauler BS. She doesn't need to be remembering all that stuff. And what’s with all the interest anyways? Don’t you even realize how good we have it? Look around.”

Gale was. Their whole coastal town took about ten seconds to take in. Every building was almost identical: utilitarian, proportionate, sleek in steel and glass and concrete. The school, stores, restaurants, and civic hall were all on the same street, next to the seawall, and a grid of housing stretched behind it. When the hurricane hit all of it would sink into the ground, leaving only flat pavement to weather the assault. Even the patches of color and green, planter boxes spread through the wealthier parts of town, would disappear into the earth at the first siren’s sound. This was the way all towns and cities were built now; and whether it was a hurricane or tornado or tsunami or flooding or mudslide or extreme heat or cold, every place had the ability to hide in the earth until it was safe to resurface, as well as an underground exit strategy when it wasn’t. They were built by the energy tech companies to house and keep alive their employees. They ran all the shops and restaurants too, since no one ever had enough money to start their own business. There might still be towns somewhere deep in the interior of the country that weren’t run by the energy tech sector, but as far as Gale knew all the old places people used to live had been destroyed by climate disasters before she was even born.

“Do you know what this place used to look like before EcoTech came in and opened up the factory?” her mom said.

Gale did. She’d seen an old photo in school of something called a beach. It stretched in a white stripe along the ocean with rows of houses reaching back from the water in greens, and blues, and yellows, and pinks, all standing on spindly legs like storks. There was no seawall then and there were people on the beach, even people in the water. Now, as far as Gale knew, there was no beach; the ocean pounded right against the seawall. Not that she’d ever seen the water, the seawall too thick and high and stretching all up and down the coast, everywhere. Maybe, like those possible non-company towns, there were possible breaks in the seawall, and beaches, where people could go and see the sea. And maybe they even swam in it.

“It was nothing but a strip of dirty, busted sand with some half-blown-over shanties left in the streets. No seawall,” her mom was saying, pointing to where the reinforced concrete structure rose like the side of a mountain into the sky. “There was no grocery store, no school, no canteen, no safe place to live! It was just filled with drunks and outcasts and thieves and liars, those people you kids today call the Hurricane Haulers. Just a bunch of losers, really, who couldn’t hack it inland and came out here thinking they could make a fortune if they could just find the right spot in the right storm. Do you know how many people died? Do you know how many times me and your uncle almost died!”

She was hitting the consul now, really whacking it so lights started flashing and the vehicle stopped. “Oh shit! Come on,” she cried and gave it one more good thwack. All the lights came back on and the engine started its uncomfortable whine.

Gale still said nothing. She was watching the sky, and the clouds had started to swirl.

*     *     *
By the time she got to Science her insides were rolling around so much she couldn’t sit still. She pounded the floor with her feet, hammered her hands into her desk, jumped if anyone called her name. All the other kids had seen her like this before, during the bad storms, and they were too busy goofing off while the Integrative Art teacher fumbled her way through the EcoTech-approved energy module to pay her any real attention. Outside the wind had already started up and the rain was coming down in forty-five-degree diagonals, lightning pricking the blue-black clouds with yellow-white shocks. Even through the school’s thick concrete walls and triple glazed windows the roar of the storm was coming, its deep register rumble, like the blare of a freight train speeding towards a crash, starting a tremble through the floor. The whole class just got louder and louder, building as the storm built, the anticipation of that first siren, and then the groaning shift when the building would start to sink, and the always unknown of how long before they would come back up, and the things they could get up to underground, away from their parents, prickling their bodies like static electricity. So when the faint beeping started from inside the climate conductor under the window next to Gale’s desk no one else noticed it. And they didn’t notice it either when she picked a small, blinking device out of the conductor and ran to the bathroom.

It was definitely an energy harnesser. She’d seen enough of them on warning adverts and in the movies to know. Just holding it could get you the death penalty. “Fucking Mr. Innis,” she said and breathed through her teeth as the beeping bounced off the bathroom tile and the blinking washed red on the metal stall doors. On the tiny screen a line swept around in a circle with every flash, and a red smudge, maybe a spiral, was moving from the upper left corner toward the center. Towards Gale. Not that she really needed the harnesser’s radar to know the storm was here. Everything inside her was jumping now, popping and bouncing, and like a release the hurricane siren finally wailed.

The building creaked, the pipes clanged, and the low thrum of the descending motors began. Gale, like every kid in the school, knew this moment well. It was the transition, the brief glimpse of time between being a normal school above ground and a sequestered school beneath it. It was absolute chaos. It didn’t need to be this way, the teachers, the principal, the administration, even the parents always working to prevent the pandemonium caused by the first siren’s call. But the kids, by instinctual agreement, refused to be tamed. And now the hallways filled with the manic shrieks of a hundred children gone mad and Gale knew this was her only chance.

What would have been the point of Mr. Innis hiding his energy harnesser right next to her desk if she didn’t actually use it? Even if her mother didn’t want to talk about it, everyone at school knew she felt the hurricanes, knew she had the power of people like her grandma and the old Hurricane Haulers to find the eyewalls and get the best energy hauls. And why should huge companies like EcoTech keep all the energy for themselves? Why couldn’t regular people have a chance to get a little ahead too? Gale didn’t know how much energy Mr. Innis’s homemade device could harness, didn’t even know if it would work. But she did know that just because something was illegal didn’t mean it wasn’t right.

She rolled out a top floor window just before it slipped underground. The storm was wild now, the rain a thousand hammers whacking her forehead and shoulders and thighs as she ran, half crouched, to hide behind the slowly sinking department store across the street. It didn’t take long to realize she didn’t have to worry about the safety drones. The wind was now too strong for anything to fly overhead. She tried to look at the energy harnesser in her last moments of shelter before the department store disappeared, but the rain beat at her eyeballs and blurred the screen. So she flipped the energy receiver switch to on and shoved the harnesser deep inside her pocket. She didn’t need it to find the eyewall. She just needed to follow the rampage rattling in her chest.

It led her a few dozen yards away to the sea wall, almost ramming her into it in the storm-spurred darkness. The wind had become a numbing roar, and she hugged the rung of a maintenance ladder cemented in the wall to stay upright. Still, her feet lifted right off the ground until her legs were flying straight behind her. It was hard to breathe into the wind, clinging like that, and she opened and closed her mouth like a netted fish, not knowing how to take in the air stampeding towards her face. Then it came, mouthful after mouthful, and she managed to hook a foot around a rung below her, and then she started to climb.

The energy harnesser was now shaking so hard she kept having to stop and push it back in her pocket. It was slow going, the wind forever threatening to snap a snaked arm or linked foot off its secure hold and sling her to the ground. The sea wall was high, maybe 800 feet, maybe more. The wind only strengthened; the rain stopped then started then washed water down in relentless waves. And still Gale climbed because the pounding thrashing her outsides finally matched the maelstrom messing her insides and it told her exactly where to go.

At the top of the seawall Gale curved her elbows, knees, and ankles around some rebar spiking skyward until she was stable. She’d never been so high. What she could catch of her town through the soaked and clobbered haze, the regular grid of streets, flat and empty, looked like a foreign pattern, a hieroglyph of untranslatable meaning, and it gave her the feeling she was now unreal, no longer part of the known world. On the other side of the wall were layers of gray furor, spinning continents of cloud jolted by lightning that reached into the terrible swell of the sea. The water was nothing like the flat blue expanse in the old picture. It sundered and seized; it trembled and twisted, crashing down on itself again and again as it churned its dark mass into ranges of foamy white. The seawall shook in its wake. And as Gale watched, the wind slamming her eyelids back so she could not blink, her lips flat against her teeth, the sea rose up in a column that filled the limits of her vision and touched the sky.

A billion hands pushed each cell of Gale’s body flatter, so her nose pressed close to her ears and her sternum clapped her spine and her thighs kissed the back of her legs. This was it, what her grandma had talked about. And although Gale could do nothing, not even breath, it no longer mattered. Air and water were pushing through her body anyway, exploding every membrane until she was free to be just the essential molecules of her existence. And there, in that elemental state, girl and storm inexorably fused, it occurred to her, as a final thought, that maybe her mother was right.

*     *     *
The old woman found her granddaughter’s body because she knew where to look. All the drones had seen were some ragged clothes caught up on the top of the seawall. It took her most of the night to climb up, in secret, but it was worth it. The energy harnesser was still there, in the pants pocket, charged now with more energy than their coastal town could use in a thousand years. A better haul than any seen in her day, but then again the storms were only getting stronger. It was a shame the girl hadn’t been four or five feet to the left. She might have missed the worst of the eyewall and still made the historic haul. A harnesser can only hold so much energy, after all. The old woman slowly pushed the girl’s remains into the sea lapping below, better to hide what had happened. Then, carefully, tucking the harnesser into her shoulder bag, she started the long journey back down.